For an initial example of the story's "modernness," we can point to its case-history approach. Contemporary readers are sufficiently clinically oriented to respond to a story of how-she-got-thatway; the title indicates what she is—a spinster—and the narrative documents the process. The heroine first becomes aware of Mr. Speed, for instance, only after her mother dies, when she can no longer withdraw into feminine protection against the opposite sex. And we see that she had been taught already to think of the opposite sex with less than charity; one recollection of the mother is her words to her son who had come home drunk: "Son, I'd rather see you in your grave." Moreover, the mother had died after a stillbirth; her death, then, is associated with her sexual function, or with what might be considered male imposition on the female. The mother had been...